Nokia aims for indoor navigation standards
Harnesses new location extension of Bluetooth to bring benefits of location awareness inside
Published: 1 December, 2011
READ MORE: Nokia | Location | Standards | Bluetooth
Location awareness has become a cornerstone of new mobile services, but they rely mainly on GPS, which is primarily an outdoor technology. Nokia wants to spearhead the creation of an industry platform for indoor navigation, using a new extension of Bluetooth, and in future other standards including, potentially, Wi-Fi.
The Finnish company's Silicon Valley-based research division is working on technology which it hopes can maintain the strong position in navigation which Nokia gained when it acquired Navteq. "We want to take what's been done in navigation outdoors and bring it inside," said principal radio systems researcher Fabio Belloni.
Nokia is leading industry work on a location extension protocol to ride on top of Bluetooth 4.0, which could be formalized as a standard by mid-2013. In an event to mark the research unit's 25th anniversary, it showed a prototype system in which a room was blanketed with Bluetooth coverage using antenna arrays and the Low Energy strand of the short range standard. These arrays tracked all kinds of devices sporting Bluetooth tags and the system then used triangulation techniques to harness that data to create 3D maps of the room and its contents.
Nokia believes the first applications would be to help people find their way round large exhibition halls or shopping malls, or to enable retailers to track shopper behaviour in stores using tagged carts.
The firm has invited about 30 other companies to take part in its work and hopes to sign them up for a more formal group aiming to set broader standards for indoor location, which could bring Wi-Fi into the mix too. In particular, the low cost Bluetooth chips might be incorporated into Wi-Fi access points.
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